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9780195160161

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Reviews

...fascinating book... Gillian Bennet, London Review of Books The Woman Who Pretended to be Who She Was offers an intriguing contribution to debates about sincerity and authenticity. Bharat Tandon, Times Literary Supplement

""Doniger, a scholar of religion and mythology at the Univ. of Chicago, completes her trilogy about the varieties of identity confusion (Splitting the Difference; The Bedtrick) with a book about the ways in which people imitate themselves. A concept that at first sounds bizarre and unlikely, self-imitation, Doniger shows, is a multi-faceted phenomenon that has been exploited by folktales around the world, and especially by movies Anyone who enjoys brain-teasing plots in mythology or cinema will be fascinated by the sheer number of examples Doniger furnishes and the ease with which she untangles their meanings.""--PW ""Doniger's sense of play and delight seems so utterly natural that one sometimes forgets that she is revealing ancient truths about who we are and how we live, about the patterns of human relationships and other messy realities.""--Parabola ""Another subtle and dizzying study of the games we play with identity, by the author of The Bedtrick."" --Mary Douglas, author of Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo ""Wendy Doniger is a wonderful writer, and when she brings the great film classics (and B-movies) into conversation with world mythology, she reveals unexpected and humanly profound patterns in both the films and the myths that no one has seen before.""--Francis Ford Coppola ""I couldn't put it down! Buy this book!--Annie Dillard, author of For the Time Being ""Doniger energetically tracks the motif of self-imitation across culture and centuries...The book brings into focus a fascinating trope and sketches its importance with an obvious delight that is both stiumulating and not itself unworthy of imitation."" --Journal of Religion

...fascinating book... Gillian Bennet, London Review of Books The Woman Who Pretended to be Who She Was offers an intriguing contribution to debates about sincerity and authenticity. Bharat Tandon, Times Literary Supplement

"""Doniger, a scholar of religion and mythology at the Univ. of Chicago, completes her trilogy about the varieties of identity confusion (Splitting the Difference; The Bedtrick) with a book about the ways in which people imitate themselves. A concept that at first sounds bizarre and unlikely, self-imitation, Doniger shows, is a multi-faceted phenomenon that has been exploited by folktales around the world, and especially by movies Anyone who enjoys brain-teasing plots in mythology or cinema will be fascinated by the sheer number of examples Doniger furnishes and the ease with which she untangles their meanings.""--PW ""Doniger's sense of play and delight seems so utterly natural that one sometimes forgets that she is revealing ancient truths about who we are and how we live, about the patterns of human relationships and other messy realities.""--Parabola ""Another subtle and dizzying study of the games we play with identity, by the author of The Bedtrick."" --Mary Douglas, author of Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo ""Wendy Doniger is a wonderful writer, and when she brings the great film classics (and B-movies) into conversation with world mythology, she reveals unexpected and humanly profound patterns in both the films and the myths that no one has seen before.""--Francis Ford Coppola ""I couldn't put it down! Buy this book!--Annie Dillard, author of For the Time Being ""Doniger energetically tracks the motif of self-imitation across culture and centuries...The book brings into focus a fascinating trope and sketches its importance with an obvious delight that is both stiumulating and not itself unworthy of imitation."" --Journal of Religion"

Author Information

Wendy Doniger is Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago, where she has taught since 1978. She has written extensively about Hindu and cross-cultural mythology, particularly about issues of illusion, animals, gender, and sex. Her most recent books are The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade (2000) and a translation (with Sudhir Kakar) of the Kamasutra (OUP, 2002).

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